Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki made no attempt to "challenge or question" inaccurate information from the Biden-Harris administration during its disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, she told lawmakers during a closed-door interview with the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In more than 230 pages of written testimony, a transcript of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, Psaki revealed that she almost never consulted with the State Department or Pentagon, the primary agencies orchestrating the withdrawal, and did not attempt to investigate information that contradicted her claims to the American public.
Psaki, who served as press secretary during the August 2021 withdrawal before leaving the administration for MSNBC, sat down for the interview with the House Foreign Affairs Committee on July 26. Lawmakers pressed her on false and misleading information she peddled from the podium during the withdrawal, the transcript shows.
Psaki, for example, called it "irresponsible" to say Americans were "stranded" in Afghanistan amid the withdrawal. One month after the administration's hurried exit, in September 2021, she said "around 100" Americans were left there. By October, administration officials were privately relaying to lawmakers that nearly 400 Americans were left in Afghanistan and still attempting to leave.
Still, Psaki said during her interview that she considered the administration's communication process during the withdrawal to be "sound." She said she did not have a "mechanism" to "challenge the quality or veracity of the policymakers’ information" related to the withdrawal.
Psaki’s long-awaited testimony—the former press secretary sat down with the committee only after it threatened to subpoena her—appears to confirm longstanding suspicions that the White House intentionally downplayed the dire situation in Afghanistan as it pushed forward with an accelerated withdrawal that almost instantly brought the Taliban back into power and left hundreds of Americans stranded in the country under the terror group’s rule.
Ahead of the withdrawal, in July 2021, State Department officials disseminated an internal dissent cable warning that the Taliban was poised to retake the country quickly once American troops left. Psaki said she "did not have independent knowledge" of that assessment and learned about it through the press.
"Because I was not in the majority of these meetings, I don’t recall having independent knowledge of that," Psaki said, adding that her job was "not to discuss everybody’s viewpoint from within the government."
As the White House press team's principal public face, Psaki provided real-time updates about America’s exit from Afghanistan. Throughout that period, Psaki said she never thought to question the information her superiors on the National Security Council produced.
"Psaki testified that she did not receive information, nor did she seek it out—whether it be through talkers, briefings, or memoranda—from the relevant principals and experts at executive agencies," a GOP House Foreign Affairs Committee source briefed on the matter told the Free Beacon. "When presented with official assessments from senior State Department and Defense Department officials which debunked and/or countered public press statements by the White House, she conveyed she did not assess or question the veracity of the information provided to her by the NSC."
Psaki, the source said, could not confirm to the committee "that she corrected those misrepresentations after the fact. Nor did she adjust her daily briefing process, instead continuing to rely on the same NSC process to inform the information she communicated to the American people on behalf of the U.S. government."
Communications professionals, Psaki said during the interview, "should not be—they don't have a means of, nor should they—seek alternate information to what the policymakers and experts on the ground are determining and providing."
Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), the committee’s chair and lead investigator, said Psaki’s testimony implicates White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan as "the source of her misleading and downright false statements on the Afghanistan withdrawal and subsequent emergency evacuation."
"It’s time for NSC Advisor Jake Sullivan to explain himself and be held accountable to the American people," McCaul told the Free Beacon.
Engaging with dissenting views, Psaki said throughout her interview, wasn't part of her job at the White House.
"My job as the spokesperson was not to discuss everybody’s viewpoint from within the government," Psaki said when asked if she was concerned her bosses at the NSC were withholding critical information. "It was to send the public what the position of the U.S. government was."
"I wouldn’t have been receiving, nor would any spokesperson be receiving, a summary of every person’s differing view in an internal National Security Council meeting," she said.
Neither MSNBC nor the NSC immediately returned requests for comment.